4 ms·
Without reciprocity, TikTok is a weapon against which America has no equivalent, and we like to stay even in arms races. Russia has very effectively used the in
by labster 4y ago
Without reciprocity, TikTok is a weapon against which America has no equivalent, and we like to stay even in arms races. Russia has very effectively used the internet to sow dissent in its geopolitical rivals, funding far-left, far-right, and separatist causes in Europe and North America. The Overton window has opened so wide that we don’t even agree on reality in the middle now.
TikTok is a way to collect personality profiles, and a way to push adversarial content to take advantage of these profiles. It can be used as a radicalization machine with very little way of detecting it with counterintelligence.
Now, whether China ever intends to use it this way is another question, as are the appropriate limits of freedom of speech for foreign actors. But the main reason they want to ban it is: it’s a weapon.
- rtkwe 4y agoI don't think I've seen anything other than yellow scare adjacent innuendo that TikTok actually has any nefarious meddling in their algorithm to push different types of content to American vs Chinese users. Youtube and Facebook have both shown that basic heuristics like showing the user things more likely to keep them on the site and interacting is more than enough to form "radicalization pipelines". As for the current consensus reality split in the US and other parts of the world I think that issue has been present and rotting at the center of mass media long before TikTok came around. There's also a big observational bias in our current issues where everything is easily documented and distributed we're able to know about all our neighbor's crazy beliefs and the same for people around the world, so maybe our consensus has always been a lot looser than we imagined we just see the crazies more these days (and the crazies see more of each other of course letting them build a wonderful little alt-reality bubble). I will agree it's definitely much easier for kooks and grifters willing to indulge them to make a buck to find each other these days which has hypercharged the issue.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoThey're coming after your children with communism and critical race theory. They're going to exploit them, kidnap them, sell them into slavery, and eat them. Mark my words: they're cannibals. ^- the prevailing, unhinged tone that hobgoblins of the uninformed American mind invent and their politicians exploit.
- sacnoradhq 4y agoX is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face. X = [fluoridation, TikTok, missing IKEA parts]